Daniel Brühl co-stars as Assange's former WikiLeaks colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg. The film is partly based on Domscheit-Berg's own book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange and the World's Most Dangerous Website, and partly on another book called WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy by British journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding

Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, The Twilight Saga - Breaking Dawn) directed from a script by Josh Singer, a former writer on The West Wing. Earlier this year Julian Assange claimed to have read the script and described it as "lie upon lie. The movie is a massive propaganda attack on WikiLeaks and the character of my staff".